Hi Carma,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 5: I have an interest that is not only enjoyable but also aligns with my personal values .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were self-direction, achievement, and benevolence.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were social, analytic, and kinesthetic.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to live a healthy but fun life .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Cook 5 meals .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Cooking healthier meals, be more healthy .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said I love eating out .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I get back from class, then I will open my fridge, find a recipe and cook myself a meal! .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Embarrassed when receiving critical feedback, and Embarrassed when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being academics .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Happiness is chasing a goal |
| Exploration before exploitation! |
| Expectations from another person become your expectations |
| Don't quit on a bad day |
| The idea behind: 'I'm not mopping the floors, I'm putting a man on the moon' |
| 'Train it to gain it' |
| The biggest obstacle to successful feedback and mentorship is people's egos |
| Figure out what your box number 2 is to help with failure |
| There is no more miserable human being than the one for whom the beginning of every bit of work must be decided anew every day |
| You should proactively seek out mentors as this can lead to self efficacy and self fulfilling prophecy |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Daniel Min |
| I really appreciated your initiative and honesty throughout our time together. I feel like you're someone who actually took full advantage of everything the class had to offer to the fullest extent. Like when you read the gratitude letters to both your parents, it was actually so heartwarming to hear how much it affected you and them. You would always start the discussion and keep it going whenever things got a little bit more silent, and you always had great input for everyone whenever we spoke. Your casual "that is so true," or something of that.
I also really appreciated how much information I learned from your skincare presentation. It felt like I was learning something new for the first time because I actually was. I had no idea the US banned literally nothing in terms of chemicals. I also didn't know how much companies thought about how their marketing strategies appealed to different cultures. So it was really interesting to learn about how different each country catered to skincare. Overall, I feel like I learned a lot, and I think I'll be a lot more careful about the skincare products I choose to use here...
|
| Annalisa Fang |
| I appreciate Carma for her willingness to be vulnerable and her passion for learning. In relation to certain class assignments, she always shared transparently about both her successes and struggles and made those around her feel comfortable with sharing as well. I also admire Carma for being so passionate about what she chooses to spend her time on and having such a positive attitude in how she approaches challenges. I think that she is a natural leader, and I’m so thankful that I got to have Carma in my group and get to know her this past semester.
Carma’s presentation taught me a lot about the skincare industry that I previously knew nothing about. For example, I learned about how skincare product regulations differ between countries and how that affects production. It was clear that she had done a lot of research and spent focused time getting to know all the information that she shared with us, and I thought that her passion for the subject was very inspiring. Carma was also an engaging speaker, and her sharing of her experiences made me reflect on the importance of mentors when embarking on this kind of new pursuit. |
| Jessica Lin |
| Carma is one of the most attentive listeners I've ever met. Regardless of how insignificant the comment may be or how she was feeling that day, she always made the effort to not only listen to what her group members had to say, but also converse with us and comment on what we had to say. Carma's attentiveness always made me feel heard and created such a warm atmosphere within our group. I'm grateful to have met Carma because she has shown me how easy it is to make others feel seen and heard with an extra little effort in responding to what other people are saying in a conversation; this is definitely something I have learnt from her and she's inspired me to try to do this more in my own life.
I learned a ton about the skincare industry from Carma's discovery project presentation in terms of substantive content on where the industry's at right now. I also really enjoyed listening to Carma's presentation because her passion for the subject matter came through very clearly. I really appreciated how Carma was able to bring together one of her passions, skincare, with one of her strengths, her business education. I can definitely see Carma's top-level goal emerging one day as a business in the skincare industry based on her current passion for the subject matter. |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.